Admitting to benefiting from white privilege does not discredit your hard work, your hardships, or any of your struggles. Privilege and hardship are not mutually exclusive. Have I experienced pain, stress, disadvantages in life? Absolutely. Am I an evil or bad person because of that fact? Absolutely not. I have never worried about whether or not there would be food on the dinner table or questioned if I would go to college or considered that I wouldn’t be able to talk things through with a police officer if I found myself in the wrong place at the wrong time. I grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood as part of an upper middle class family. skinny privilege, passport privilege, socioeconomic privilege, education privilege, pretty privilege, heterosexual privilege and probably many more that I haven’t identified or considered). In fact, there are many types of privilege I benefit from (ie. I am half white and benefit from white privilege. You are not a bad person for either of those statements. It is okay to admit that you have white privilege. Nothing I say below is going to accuse you of being a bad person.

Nothing I say below is going to attack you.

And just suspend it for five minutes, okay? My words are just about our experiences as human beings in this world. Take every notion you carry regarding what “they” believe, whether it’s the crazy liberals, the crazy conservatives, or your crazy neighbor.